Welcome! Prerequisites, focus & outcome

Welcome to the Magento 2 Coding Kickstart course! My name is Mark Shust, and I’ve been a Magento developer now for over a decade. While I picked up Magento 1 fairly naturally, Magento 2 was always extremely difficult for me, and the framework seemed so complex. But, after a lot of trial & error, I finally started picking it up little by little, until I eventually became extremely proficient.

I wish I had a course to guide me when I started, so I set out to create the course I wish I had when I started programming Magento 2. These complex topics, broke down into extremely small & easy to understand lessons.

The Coding Kickstart course covers all of the core fundamentals that you need to become a proficient Magento 2 developer, to kick the wheels so you can start to be productive way more quickly. You’ll learn about the app structure, how routing & controllers work, how to extend core code, dependency injection & interfaces, different design patterns and usages, ways to modify the page layout, and understand data management. It is geared towards backend development, but almost all of the concepts in this course also apply to frontend developers, as they need to truly know how the core of Magento works before understanding the frontend.

This is a mostly a video-baed course. If code examples are in a lesson, there is also a related link to the source code on GitHub, as well as a place to leave comments on the lesson. Some lessons have additional info & graphics below the video, so be sure to check those out along the way.

This course assumes you have experience working with PHP and have some web development experience. Most importantly, for this course to be successful you need to have a bit of grit and a lot of patience. Magento 2 is still very difficult, but I hope this course extremely simplifies the really hard & complex tasks that you can’t quite understand at the moment.

Be sure to have a Magento development environment up & running. If you do not already have one, check out my docker-magento project. There is a related course on M.academy for setting up & managing that environment. Please do not continue with this course until you have this development environment set up! It’s very important.

If you have questions, you can leave comments directly on the related lesson. This keeps the context of the topic you are asking, and I’m notified & try to respond to comments as soon as possible.

Thanks for enrolling, and good luck with the course!